Love is a key concept for Paul—but perhaps “concept” is a misnomer for what the apostle believes and teaches.… But love is rather a way of life for Paul. The severity and gravity with which his theology has been treated have obscured the winsomeness that must have been a major factor in his evangelistic success. The personality revealed in the letter to Philemon is evidence of this. Moreover, it is not only where the term is used that love plays a role in Paul’s thought. A good example is his recommendation regarding response to the weak person. This is why Paul can make love the critical factor in spiritual communication. Without love there can be no depth perception of God, who is love; so persons cannot understand each other in relation to God and the universe without love. The inner significance of the breakdown in communication at various levels today has been reflected by modern art and literature to a considerable degree in that their very forms are chosen for the sake of denying the communication of an intelligible idea of one person to another—since existence is absurd, art and literature must express absurdity. Perhaps this illustrates Paul’s point: the only disposition that makes communication possible is love, which must include acceptance of the other person as one who exists in his or her own right, willingness to listen to what the other person is saying, concern to communicate in language the other person can understand, and openness of goodwill aimed at the welfare of the other. The gift of prophecy has a double function: the ability to foresee the future and predict it, and the power to speak for God to the human conscience. Without love this is abortive. All mysteries also have a twofold thrust. One of the competitors of the Christian faith in Corinth was oriental mystery religion. Paul, however, would reduce this to a minimal status in comparison with understanding of God’s providence, his plans for the future, the concealed meaning of the scriptures, and the questions about the nature of God and his relation to finite reality that human reason cannot discover without revelation. Similarly, all knowledge comprises the pretensions of Gnostic wisdom, theological knowledge about God as revealed, analyzed, and systematized by the human mind, truth recorded in scripture, and information about all reality. All faith refers to confidence and trust in God that makes a person an open channel for special action of God. It means the sort of power that some people have when their presence conveys healing, assurance, and consolation, the power that others have in getting great works done without being overwhelmed by opposition or difficulty, the ability to sustain serene assurance about life that carries through sickness, pain, disappointment, grief, and death. Such faith is dramatized by the figure of moving mountains, a power attributed to nature’s God in the Old Testament but applied to believers by Jesus. Each of these spiritual gifts is great, and together they are a formidable array of power. Paul boldly asserts that all of these without love are nothing. Their motivation, orientation, and purpose are ineffectual unless love gives them God’s dimension. This is made even clearer by another illustration: even the ethical laudability of one who distributes his property for the needy and makes the ultimate self-sacrifice “but [does] it in pride” (Goodspeed) is utterly valueless unless he has love. All of this Paul puts in the first person to demonstrate that his doctrine represents his very personal convictions. --William F. Orr and James Arthur Walther, I Corinthians:Vol. 32, Anchor Yale Bible
Posted on: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 00:38:10 +0000
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